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Part and parcel of being an actor is lacking out on roles that you’re determined to play, though Matt Damon has navigated the final three many years with out having to fret about it an excessive amount of.
Ever since Good Will Hunting remodeled him from a relative unknown to an Academy Award winner in a single day, he’s been hovering round the high of the casting want checklist. He’s served his time as a slumming, jobbing upstart who couldn’t get a job to save lots of his life, which hasn’t dominated him out of getting any regrets.
Edward Norton’s flip in Primal Fear was the first one that got away, as a result of Damon was totally conscious that it could be a career-maker for the one who was finally solid, which it was, even when there’s a weird alternate timeline on the market the place Danny Dyer’s audition was successful and he performed Aaron Stampler.
Once he’d solidified himself as a star, although, he was the one being supplied the elements as a substitute of getting to scrap for them. James Cameron’s recollection of the Avatar state of affairs is completely different from his, however other than the eye-watering quantity of cash he missed out on, Damon received’t look again at not enjoying Jake Sully and rue the day.
That’s not the case with Dan White, who undoubtedly match the invoice. No stranger to working with Gus Van Sant, the Good Will Hunting and Gerry collaborators have been signed, sealed, and delivered to reunite on the filmmaker’s biographical drama, Milk, and the ink on the contract had properly and actually dried by early 2007.
Unfortunately, Damon hit a roadblock. Van Sant wouldn’t make the movie with out Sean Penn in the title role, with scheduling conflicts rearing their ugly head. The begin of manufacturing was pushed again to January 2008, and he’d already dedicated to re-teaming with one other frequent artistic companion, Steven Soderbergh, for The Informant!
When USA Today requested him about the one that got away, he solely had one regretful reply. “I was supposed to do Milk with Gus,” he defined. “Then Sean had something happen to his schedule, and he had to push the movie, which made it a conflict for me, so I got recast with Josh Brolin.”
“I loved the script, and I’d already done research on it,” Damon added, however not with out praising his substitute. “But as much as I wanted to be in that, it was probably better served by Josh. He was amazing. It was a moment in my 30s when I was like, ‘That must have happened for a reason’. So I was sanguine about it at the end.”
Sanguine or not, Brolin notched an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, which can properly have occurred to Damon had these scheduling points not arisen. It took Milk almost 20 years to reach the screen, nevertheless it was a matter of months that dominated him out of the role.
